ROBERTA DE MONTICELLI

Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele

demonticelli.roberta@unisr.it

THE PARADOX OF AXIOLOGY. A

PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH
TO VALUE THEORY

abstract

Are values more than measures of our needs and desires or internalized social and cultural rules of
behaviour, originating in cultures and devoid of any universally accessible objectivity? Is there a place
for values in a world of facts? If so, how can values preserve their ideality and normativity? If not, how
can value judgements be true or false? Max Scheler’s Material Axiology is the best answer Classical
Phenomenology provides to this dilemma. Yet Material Axiology, in particular material ethics of values,
is largely ignored or looked down upon for being based on unclear presuppositions. This paper tries to
provide a fresh start by clarifying the bottom-up approach characteristic of phenomenology with an
exercise in experimental phenomenology in which I will analyse the actual experience of certain aesthetic
values in emotionally qualified perception.

keywords

experimental phenomenology, value theory, metaethics, material axiology

Phenomenology and Mind, n. 15 - 2018, pp. 116-128 © The Author(s) 2018

DOI: 10.13128/Phe_Mi-24976 CC BY 4.0 Firenze University Press
Web: www.fupress.net/index.php/pam ISSN 2280-7853 (print) - ISSN 2239-4028 (on line)
 The Paradox of Axiology

1. The Paradox of What is the Paradox of Axiology?

Axiology
There is a puzzle about the very nature of values that makes the possibility of their existence
seem paradoxical. It rests on an apparent opposition between values and reality, an opposition
or contrast which philosophy has always registered. For example, it is at the root of Plato’s
characterization of Goodness as “beyond substance”, as well as of Hume’s dichotomy of facts
and values and of the Naturalistic Fallacy that Moore cautions against. Even Kant’s purely
deontological foundation of ethics is best understood as a response to the Paradox of Axiology.
The Paradox of Axiology has been rephrased, in contemporary metaethics, as the Dilemma
of Metaethics, that is a dilemma concerning the status of value properties. If they were real
or natural properties, they would seem to lose their essentially normative character. But, if
that’s so, then in order to preserve their normative character they would have to be creatures
of another world. The presently available metaethical accounts of value purport to offer
solutions to this dilemma.
The Paradox of Axiology is a serious one, albeit a “paradox” only in the weak sense of being
something “beyond common opinion”. Yet, it teaches us a lot about the very nature of
values. Moreover, it calls our attention to something that is in fact part of the “whatness”
of values as they are experienced. The Paradox existed long before its technical metaethical
conceptualization was introduced. It is constantly “lived” as an tension between the ideal and
the real. Ideality is an essential feature of values. It is also a paradoxical one, for positive values are
never as vividly given as they are in the painful recognition of their absence on earth, when
the corresponding goods are missing, which most of the time (but not necessarily) means
that the corresponding negative values are realized in their place. Through real injustice we
come to see what justice is, and that what a just society is, is what most actual societies are not.
The content of justice is exemplified by what societies could be and ought to be like, or by ideal
societies.
One of the most popular strategies for explaining this Paradox away is to remove from value
terms their value content, or matter. I call the result of this move the No-Matter-of-Value
Thesis. We shall explore it further below.

117
Roberta De Monticelli

I shall argue for following claims: 2. Claims

C1. The No-Matter-of-Value Thesis makes the Paradox of Axiology unsolvable.

C2. Experimental Phenomenology1 shows that the No-Matter-of-Value Thesis is false.

C3. Experimental Phenomenology provides a foundation to Material Axiology2.

Most past and present conceptualizations of the Paradox are astoundingly silent about value 3. The No-Matter-
experience and the life world, that is, about what appears to be the source of ordinary talk on of-Value Thesis
value. So, in most cases, the data needed for any theory of value aiming to solve the Paradox
are simply ignored.
In the contemporary debate on metaethics the problem is structural. For it depends on a
methodological feature apparently inherited from the meta-linguistic origins of metaethics,
namely, the exclusive focus on terms and concepts, as opposed to the corresponding non-
conceptual contents or data. The second-order level of metaethical discussions induces
authors to address the “nature” or the “status” of value properties in general, most of the time,
without any intuitive exhibition and analysis of their instances. I’ll call this way of arguing at a
conceptual level only, without regard for phenomenal contents, a top-down strategy.
Much gets lost, though, concerning the very nature of values when the fact that they are
qualities that can be experienced independently of their explicit conceptualization is ignored.
Take ferocity. Infants may be frightened by the ferocious look of a warrior’s mask, yet without
having at their disposal the concepts of ferocity and of mask. This says something about the
nature of values.
Ferocity is a typically “thick” value term. Now, the whole metaethical debate hinges on finding
a satisfactory solution to the fact-value dichotomy, whether it is understood in Humean or
Moorean terms. But this dichotomy, as is well known, faces apparent counterexamples in so
called “thick” value-terms, or value concepts.
Such terms as “ferocious”, “courageous”, and “cruel” – or, for that matter, “graceful” or
“vigorous” – denote “thick” concepts, or concepts provided with descriptive content, as opposed
to “thin” terms such as “right” or “good” which only seem to express normativity apart from
any descriptive content.
Thick concepts would appear to escape the dichotomy. Edmund Husserl discussed this issue at
the very beginning of the last century3, long before it became a matter of controversy in the
Fifties between Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch on one side, and Richard Hare on the other4.

1 Albertazzi (2013), Husserl (1970a), pp. 203-209.

2 Scheler (1973).
3 Husserl (1970), Vol I, §§14-16; Hans Kelsen dismissed Husserl’s rejection of the dichotomy – much too hastily, I think
- in his Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (1979), cf. Kelsen (1996).
4 Philippa Foot argues against the arbitrariness attached to the usage of “prescriptive” or “action guiding” words
such as the names of virtues, or of words like “danger” or “pride” in case there where there is no “internal relation”
between “commending” or evaluating and the non-evaluative meaning of these words (Foot 1978, pp. 83-104, the
text was originally a paper delivered at Bedford University in 1958). Iris Murdoch opens up a much wider horizon in
her criticism of “voluntarism” in value theory, targeting both (Sartrean) existential philosophy, with its reject of any
rational justification of choices, as well as “linguistic” or Oxford moral philosophy, with its prescriptivism rejecting
experience, research into the moral meaning of facts, learning, and discouraging of what Murdoch calls attention,
which she explains thus: “I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of
a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality” (Murdoch 1970 p. 33). As for Richard Hare, while his book
on The Language of Morals (1952) reinforces Hume’s dichotomy as a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive
language (the language of morals being the latter), the challenge of thick value terms is addressed in his (1981) Moral

118
 The Paradox of Axiology

Thick value terms can be used to challenge Hume’s claim that one cannot derive an Ought from
an Is. If, for example, being courageous is a professional quality of a warrior, then a warrior
ought to be courageous. Or, put in terms of truth makers, there is a quality rich in descriptive
content – courage – which makes an Is value statement true or false. That quality is the
referent of such expressions as “Jack is courageous” (which is contingently true or false), and
“An ideal warrior is courageous” (which is a necessary truth).
The standard move suggested by a top-down approach is to split a thick concept into two
parts, i.e., a descriptive content and a normative operator, where the descriptive content is
and has to be a purely “factual” or “natural” content. This was the move first made by Kelsen
(in response to Husserl) and by Richard Hare (in response to Philippa Foot).
Bernard Williams approvingly sums up this move in a very clear way:

The clearest account, as so often, is given by Hare: a term of this kind involves a
descriptive complex to which a prescription has been attached, expressive of the values
of the individual or of the society. … It is essential to this account that the specific or
‘thick’ character of these terms is given in the descriptive element. The value part is
expressed, under analysis, by the all-purpose prescriptive term ought5.

On this account, value concepts have no axiological contents. Either they are thin, and
just prescriptions, or they are thick, and all the content they have is factual. Let’s call this
statement the No-Matter-of-Value Thesis.
This thesis is, in fact, a consequence of Moore’s thesis of irreducibility, plus Moore’s claim that
value concepts are non-analyzable. No matter how a thick value concept is analyzed in factual
terms, there will be a residual value – such as the goodness of being courageous – that resists
analysis in non-axiological terms. Otherwise, you run afoul of the naturalistic fallacy.
Now, this thesis is false. The rest of this paper is devoted to arguing against this very popular
mistake, which I take to be caused by the kind of value blindness that goes along with a top-
down approach.

4. The Falsity of Suppose you can analyse a thick value term in the way just suggested. So, a ferocious
the No-Matter-of- expression expresses preparedness to behave in a ferocious way, and a ferocious behaviour is
Value Thesis such and such a behaviour, e.g., a fierce, wild, violent one. This, of course, sets us on the path
of an infinite regress, for here ferocity is analysed in terms of other value qualities.
Suppose, then, that ferocity just “supervenes” on a class of animal behaviours which can be
described in purely “factual”, say, “natural” terms, or that the predicate “is ferocious” can be
analysed in terms of those animal behaviours plus an “all-purpose prescriptive (negative) term
ought”. Now, is there any factual or natural property shared by these animal behaviours and,
say, a ferocious joke, a ferocious ideology, a ferocious question? Is there any natural property
common to elegant things, such as an elegant dress, an elegant apartment, an elegant gait, or a
piece of elegant prose? It does not seem that we can find one.
And yet, we are usually able to tell ferocious or elegant things from those which are not. How
is that possible? An obvious answer is that we do so by employing the concept of ferocity.
But if the preceding argument is valid, then this concept is not analyzable in terms of factual
contents plus a prescriptive operator. So, the real question is: What is the source of this
concept? Given that it cannot be a given matter of fact, should we not then take it to be a given

Thinking with the two-components theory (see below and footnote 5).
5 Williams (1985), p. 130. This is the so-called Two Components Theory. (Putnam 2004, p. 41).

119
Roberta De Monticelli

matter of value, as it were? Perhaps its source is, in other words, a non-conceptual or pre-
conceptual axiological content or datum. Should we not then consider, at least as a hypothesis,
that what a thick concept may more or less aptly capture is the content of a given value as such,
its ideal and normative “matter”, which we have, so to speak, in front of us and “consult”?

Now, this kind of data or given non-conceptual contents is exactly what a top-down approach 5. Back to the
to value is blind to. things themselves.
Our first move, then, is to make explicit the methodological rule of phenomenology as a The bottom-
bottom-up approach (in value theory but not in that alone): up approach of
Experimental
(Meth): No theoretical problem about a type of thing S should be addressed without Phenomenology
recourse to the intuitive presence of some token or instance, s, of S.

(Meth) is just an application of phenomenology’s primary charge, “Back to the things

themselves”, or the principle of the priority of the given over conceptual construction. (Meth) is the
means by which the oft-neglected world of everyday experience becomes again the privileged
object of philosophical inquiry.
Our bottom-up approach can be introduced with a simpler type of case, the sort in which
perception of value is in some sense “added to” perception in the most literal sense, i.e.,
sensory perception. We shall start with some examples of a type of quality that tradition
recognizes as being “given to perception”, in aesthesis, that is, aesthetic qualities.
Claim 3 needs the support of experimental argumentation. To that end, some images will be
shown that exemplify ferocity as a non-conceptual content or a value quality. Experimental
Phenomenology will help us analyze this quality in terms of a typically tertiary quality, or
quality of demand. This quality of demand is a global feature of perceptual configurations,
constraining possible (co)variations of their contents, in all possible worlds in which ferocity
is instantiated. Such a global quality is there, given in experience, as a matter of value. Its
normative power, far from being “lost in description” – as if in principle descriptive language
could not convey ideality – pertains to the qualified object essentially, or in all possible worlds
in which it exists.
Material axiology is a generalization of this discovery, according to which value terms do have
a descriptive axiological content, and a very rich one, which can be analysed by reference to
objects’ axiological qualities.

Here, in Figure 1, is an example readily available on the internet of a ferocious expression. 6. Some images
Many things are apparently ferocious, and yet it is quite difficult to find a “natural” or
“factual” property that might be shared by everything that has a ferocious appearance,
ranging from a warrior’s mask, certain animal behaviours, or a scene of Artaud’s cruelty
theatre, to an ideology, or even some jokes. But we rightly distinguish beautiful from ugly
things, cruelty from mildness. The mask depicted in Figure 1 could not possibly be deemed
mild or elegant.
How can we identify cruelty and ferocity? By the concept cruel? But there is evidently no
factual property shared by cruel jokes and, say, cruel meals!
Yet, as Iris Murdoch argues at length, it is always possible to improve one’s understanding of
thick value concepts, such as impudence or courage. How is that possible, given what I’ve just
said?
If we try to resolve the problem by appealing to the mask’s ferocious appearance, a natural
answer would be that there is in its appearance a matter to be looked at – and felt. A matter
120
The Paradox of Axiology

of value, though, rather than a matter of fact. I’ve chosen a mask deliberately, for a mask
is a means of make believe. When wearing such a mask, one can appear ferocious without
having to be ferocious – regardless of the purpose this disguise may serve, whether it is ritual,
theatrical, or a matter of carnival farce. A mask is an object under epochè, like any aesthetical
object. It presents us with a quality which might be instanced in reality – the ferocious
expression of an actual warrior – but which we grasp, so to speak, in the “abstract”, divorced
from any genuine exercise of ferocity.

Figure 1

Let’s briefly practice “contemplation,” or, in Murdoch’s terms, the improvement of our
insightful understanding of ferociousness. We certainly have a lot of matter to conceptualize,
matter that is first given to visual-cum-emotional perception. We are “struck” by more and
more features, which we may or may not be able to adequately capture in words (not just
any word will do!). We detect a quality of wildness or savageness which suggests, despite the
evident shape and aspect of a human face, a lack of humanity. We sense hostility, aggressiveness,
rapaciousness and greed. We are scared by the face’s fury (seen in the eyes) and apparent
mordacity (visible in the teeth). The grim look of the mask exhibits a power of tearing apart and
destroying in its sharp and pointed features…
This description serves as a counterexample to the idea that value terms are just action-
guiding terms. When I describe this mask as “ferocious” I am not warning you against any
menace to your life or integrity, nor am I prescribing you to avoid encounters with it, etc. The
point also works as a counterexample both to Hare’s prescriptivism and to emotivism. For the
very same quality might be manifested in an act of cruelty, too. You would no doubt be right
to fear being killed. And, were that to actually happen, it would be awkward if we then had to
choose between either (a) admitting that “It was a cruel, a ferocious act” is a value judgment
while denying the judgment a truth value or (b) admitting that the judgment corresponds
to the pertinent facts while denying it the status of a value judgment. That awkwardness
indicates, as is usually the case with thick terms, the untenability of the fact/value distinction.
So, here a Two-Component Theory à la Hare (ascribing the judgment a descriptive content
plus a prescriptive force) might help. But again, it would be no help for understanding the
related case of the mask, despite the fact that the value quality manifested there is exactly the
same.
Expressive qualities are a subclass of value qualities that typically “present” the agents having
them as other selves, namely, as subjects (or quasi-subjects) of emotion and action. It is by
121
Roberta De Monticelli

means of these qualities that we usually take something to be another self. They present us
with socially relevant properties of encountered agents and their actions.
But, when experienced in a purely aesthetical attitude, expressive qualities can be explored
in a “detached” way, so that the pertinent emotions can be vividly felt without becoming
reasons for action (think of thrillers, horror pictures, and so on). Aesthetic experience switches
off action and at the same time deepens cognition. Figure 2 gives a further example, this
time presenting a familiar scenario from ordinary life, of the “abstraction” involved in the
appreciation of aesthetic value.

Figure 2

In comparison with the previous examples, the Halloween Pumpkin is a more “abstract”
version of a ferocious expression. It is an almost simplified or schematic version of ferocity (an
“eidos” of it?). You’ll notice nonetheless how well the salient features of apparent ferocity are
preserved. In fact, a matter of real life and action has become pure play here with the help of
this “aesthetic” object and our taking on the “right” attitude toward it. In aesthetic experience
one apprehends the quality without being moved to action, thus taking it up in a dispassionate
cognitive attitude. In pretense, as in some kinds of plays and games, the motivational power of
qualities is in the “as if” mode, but you enact corresponding “as if” actions in relation to them.
Aesthetic experience switches off real action and switches on value cognition. This is
especially true in the case of expressive qualities. A brief foray into the history of 20th century
visual art will make the point clear.
In the Preface of an old English translation of Vassily Kandinsky’s Punkt und Linie zu Fläche
(1926) we find a nice anecdote on the meaning of “abstract” painting:

Upon his return to Munich, one evening there occurred at dusk the magical incident
of his seeing merely the form and tone values in one of his paintings. While not
recognizing its subject, he was not only struck by its increased beauty but also by the
superfluity of the object in painting, in order to feel its spell. It took him fully two years
to crystallize this miraculous discovery6.

6 Kandinsky (1926), p. 7. The date of this discovery is supposed to be about 1908. Even if Rebay does not report
this detail, the tradition has it that the picture that struck Kandinsky in this way was not one of his own, but
rather Monet’s Sheafs in the sun. The (1926) treatise was published sixteen years after his first one, Das Geistige in
der Kunst (1910), and is based on Kandinsky’s teaching at the Bauhaus in Berlin (1921-24). It’s a nice coincidence
that while the first treatise, written in Munich, is more or less contemporary with the flourishing of the Munich
psychologist Theodor Lipps’ studies on empathy and aesthetics and the critical, very productive discussion of them
within the Phenomenological Circle of Munich, animated by Scheler and attended by two of the most significant
phenomenologists of aesthetics, Moritz Geiger and Dietrich von Hildebrand, the second one, crystallizing his teaching

122
The Paradox of Axiology

The quotation conveys all that is needed to appreciate the series of visual experiments
Kandinsky provides in the appendix of this remarkably valuable work. Let’s examine just two
examples. So-called “abstract” painting only makes explicit – and does so in a programmatic
way – what has always been true of painting, regardless of the views the painter or
mainstream opinion about painting in different epochs. It highlights how visual art, correctly
enjoyed, lets us see the how, and not only the what, of visible things. Generalized, we could
say that aesthetic information is about the how and not the what, or that it’s about whatness,
but only insofar as it can be made apparent independently of whether and where it exists,
or whether it is really as it appears. Painting is about qualities, even those making up the
solidity and three-dimensionality of the painting’s subject matter. It is about the gravity and
seriousness of what is real, as is particularly evident in Cezanne’s use of the canvas. Qualities
are the real “subject” of even the most figurative and “classic” painting. Geometry itself
appears as the quality of an orderly world, an intelligible cosmos encompassing the City of
Humans. That is true, for instance, of certain paintings by Piero della Francesca.
Once you realize that the visual arts help to free visual perception from the practical tasks
it serves in ordinary life and to free visual contents from their function of orienting you in
reality, the supporting role of the “subject” (e.g., a depicted object) in such work is no longer
necessary for appreciating the “how”, the pure visual content of possible perceptual worlds.
Indeed, there is no need for a return to Platonism to understand Klee’s dictum that painting
does not reproduce the visible, but makes even the “invisible” visible.
Klee’s dictum refers to what I’ve called value cognition. By “contemplating” visual art we come
to “improve our understanding” (as per Murdoch) of expressive qualities. Actually, we come to
improve our discriminative perception of them. More examples will prove helpful here.

Figure 3. From V. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane 7

years in Berlin, is more or less contemporary to the flourishing of the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology in the 1920s
and the beginning of the 1930s, before the Nazi catastrophe.
7 Kandinsky (1926), Anhang (Appendix), Diagram 20, (1946) p. 152.

123
Roberta De Monticelli

Figure 4. From V. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane 8

The “titles” given by Kandinsky to these drawing are respectively: “9 points in ascent
(emphasis upon the diagonal d-a through weight)” (Figure 39); and “Diagonal tensions and
counter-tensions with a point which brings an external construction to inner pulsation”
(Figure 4) , The first is meant to illustrate the role of the point in visual form and the latter the
role of the line.
Both configurations feature a striking dynamism, a quality we perceive or feel even if we know
that the lines or the points on the paper are in fact motionless. Theodor Lipps (1906) describes
this kind of quality as presenting “the life of lines”, as it were:

[A] movement, such as stretching out, growing longer, self-restricting, abruptly starting
and ending, or steady sliding, swinging up and down, bending, stooping, squeezing and
expanding. All these predicates do not refer to geometrical features of the form, but
denote activities…10.

We can call the qualities Lipps refers to as dynamic qualities. The drama of the lines and the
rising of the points in Kandinsky may well be a good (almost) contemporary example of what
Lipps has in mind11.

8 Kandinsky (1926), Anhang (Appendix), Diagram 20, (1946) p. 186.

9 Kandinsky rejects customary distinctions of “the graphic” and “the pictorial”, according to which line is the essential
element of graphics but is “in painting, contrary to its nature and, therefore, forbidden”. Here is his rationale: “This
is a characteristic example of the existing confusion in concepts: that which can easily be segregated and placed in
separate categories is mixed together (art, nature), and, on the other hand, the things that belong together (painting
and graphics) are carefully separated from each other. The line is considered here to be a ‘graphic’ element and not to
be used for ‘pictorial’ purposes, although an elementary difference between ‘graphics’ and ‘painting’ cannot be found
and could never be established by the theorists mentioned”. Kandinsky (1946), p. 110.
10 Lipps, T. (1903-06), p. 184. Our translation.
11 Even if the theories of Point and Line to Plane (1926) emerge after Lipps’ Aesthetics, Kandinsky’s “first abstract
watercolour” was painted about 1908, preceded by a rich series of works where the dedicated study of both expressive
and dynamic qualities is more than evident. The same is true of other work done within the avant-garde art of the early
20th century, and especially in Munich, where Kandinsky, with Franz Marc, Paul Jawlensky and others founded, as is
well known, the Blaue Reiter movement (1911-14).

124
 The Paradox of Axiology

7. Abstract Instituting a pictorial space means literally “abstracting” these pervasive yet silent qualities
Visual Art and from our concrete surrounding world in order to display them before our eyes, as objects
Experimental whose variations and possibilities offer us a new, infinite domain of exploration12. This is, after
Phenomenology all, what painters have always done. The frame of a painting manifests the initial “bracketing”
the painter performs with respect to all the non-aesthetic goals of ordinary perception. It
separates pictorial space from one’s surrounding actual space.
Yet it is only around the birth of “modern” art that this “bracketing” and this “abstraction”,
achieved with the aid of aesthetic objects and their means (scores and melodies13, paper and
drawings, collages, etc.), entered the laboratories of science and gave rise to experimental
phenomenology14, including, very early on, Gestalt psychology.
What grounds abstract painting is indeed the very same discovery with which Gestalt
psychology began. Both recognize that perceptual contents, far from being the unorganized
“multiplicity” or “chaos” (Kant) of sense data postulated by the empiricist tradition,
are organized by “configural” or structural properties. These properties are given, not
“constructed”, and are non-conceptual, pre-linguistic, and often multi-modal or amodal in
nature.
The fact that the two groups of researchers share a common root is something no author could
better bear witness to than Rudolf Arnheim, the brightest pupil of Max Wertheimer. Arnheim
was a brilliant young art critic in the roaring 1920s in Berlin, the director of the Italian Istituto
del Cinema in the 1930s, and the founder of the psychology of visual art in his post-exile
American academic life15. I quote him at length below not only because he and others of his
school gave us a language for describing the axiological contents of aesthetical values, but
also because there are passages in his work that bring the common root of Gestalt Psychology
and abstract painting to the foreground. Take, for instance, this powerful synthesis of the
“Kandinskian” analysis of dynamic qualities we’ve just reconstructed:

Visual experience is dynamic. This theme will recur throughout the present book.
What a person or animal perceives is not only an arrangement of objects, of colors
and shapes, of movements and sizes. It is, perhaps first of all, an interplay of directed
tensions. These tensions are not something the observer adds, for reasons of his own,
to static images. Rather, these tensions are as inherent in any percept as size, shape,
location, or color. Because they have magnitude and direction, these tensions can be
described as psychological ‘forces.’16

12 This point of course generalizes across the visual arts, and, mutatis mutandis, the institution of other aesthetical
spaces, like that of music.
13 As is well known, the notion of “Gestalt” had been introduced into psychology by Christian von Ehrenfels in 1890
in his essay “On Gestalt qualities”, where, observing that humans can recognize two melodies as identical even when
no two corresponding notes in them have the same frequency, he argued that these forms must possess a “Gestalt
quality”—a characteristic that is immediately given, over and above the single tones. Cf. von Ehrenfels C., Über
“Gestaltqualitäten”. (1890), Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. 1890;14:224–292. (Translated as “On
‘Gestalt qualities’”. In B. Smith (Ed. & Trans.), (1988), Foundations of Gestalt Theory (pp. 82–117). Munich, Germany/
Vienna, Austria: Philosophia Verlag.)
14 I use this expression, “experimental phenomenology,” to refer to that part of early experimental psychology that
harboured and outlasted classical Gestalt psychology, on the one hand, and that instigated the powerful approach to
generalization which led Husserl to the study of the eidetic universe. See De Monticelli (2018).
15 Rudolph Arnheim’s life (1904, Berlin – 2007, Ann Arbor, USA) actually spans the great temporal distance between
the time of Stumpf, Husserl and Wertheimer and our own. See Arnheim (1954, 1974). The 1974 edition is a revised
version of the original, published after 20 years of teaching in several New York Universities and Harvard University.
16 ibid., p. 11.

125
Roberta De Monticelli

Perhaps no image could better illustrate the concept of visual force or tension at the heart
of Kandinsky’s theory of elements (especially as it concerns point and plane) than the one
reproduced in Figure 5. It exemplifies one of the phenomena to which Arnheim devoted most
of his research, namely, the “power of centre.”

Figure 5. The Power of the centre

This figure – which is the first presented in his main work, occurring in the section titled
“Balance”17 – illustrates the first principle of Gestalt theory. The fact that we perceive the
slightly off-centre position of the “point” on the square plane is evidence for the principle that
we grasp organized wholes. What we experience in perception is not the association of atomic
perceptual data, but the immediate givenness of the elements appearing from the start as a
function of the wholes to which they belong.
Wagemans and colleagues put the point thus: “The contents of our awareness are by and large
not additive but possess a characteristic coherence”18. There are several additional principles
further articulating this notion of coherence that are also illustrated by this simple figure.
Firstly, there is the principle of figure/ground, according to which the partial contents we
perceive are experienced as segregated from a background. Secondly, there is the principle
of unity, the basic organizing factor discussed by Kandinsky, which highlights structural
features such as the square basic plane with its horizontal and vertical boundaries, its center,
and its diagonals. Here the invisible center is manifested by the off-center point, and induces a
dynamic quality within the figure, giving the impression of things being imbalanced.
I defer again to the expertise of Arnheim:

The disk in Figure 5 is not simply displaced with regard to the center of the square.
There is something restless about it. It looks as though it had been at the center and
wished to return, or as though it wants to move away even farther. And the disk’s
relations to the edges of the square are a similar play of attraction and repulsion19.

The “power of the center” in a sense “requires” the disk to be centred, that is, for the simple
composition to reach balance. This is the first mention I’ve made so far of that feature of the
perceived world that Wolfgang Koehler called “requiredness”, a type of “oughtness” which
turns out to pervade the life world and also indicates for us the “place” that values have in it.
This simple example shows that it is not really a “subjective” – or rather, arbitrary – matter

17 Ibid. p. 10.
18 Wagemans and colleagues, 2012: 1172–1217. Published online 2012 Jul 30. doi: 10.1037/a0029333, https://www.ncbi.
nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3482144/
19 Arnheim (1974), p. 12.

126
 The Paradox of Axiology

to perceive what is required in a given context. Requiredness is not reducible to the allegedly
prescriptive component of a thick value term (like imbalanced or disharmonious). There is of
course nobody “requiring” the disk to be centred, any more than there is always someone
commanding a warrior to be courageous or commandig someone giving an argument to
ensure its validity. Nor are such thick value terms necessarily action guiding. They have plenty
of descriptive content. But this content consists in qualities of requirednesses or – as it is
referred to in experimental phenomenology – of “qualities of demand” (Albertazzi 2013). We
literally perceive the demands that things manifest.
Similarly, the apparent ascending movement we perceive in Kandinsky’s rising points in
Figure 3 is also not “merely subjective”. If it is an illusion, it is not correctable, much like those
so called “illusions” (such as the Muller-Lyer) that once led Gestalt psychologists to radically
question the causal-physicalistic model of perception. The lightness of the “ascending points”
is a material value quality, the global quality of a well-organized whole.

8. Conclusion Moore’s greatest intuition – that ideality is irreducible to reality – is tangled up with his worst
mistake, which was to hold that Goodness or the Good is “a simple, non-analysable object
of thought”20. Against Moore, we ought to hold instead that “Goodness” is a proxy word for
“any positive value quality”. That is, it functions as a variable ranging over thick or material
values. As an attributive adjective applicable to exemplars of various kinds of things (e.g., as
with the phrase “a good knife”) it is a variable ranging over the positive value qualities of ideal
exemplars of the relevant kind (e.g., functional value qualities, in the case of this domestic
tool). As a moral predicate (“morally good”) it is a thick, –not thin, concept, ranging over all
moral virtues and qualities of an intention, action, or person enabling them to realize the best
value(s) possible in a given situation, which presupposes that we are capable of perceiving
what is required in the first place, in short, that we are capable of attention.
The upshot of this analysis is that, more generally, thin values depend on thick values, and
it is false that thick values have no descriptive value content, i.e., that value qualities cannot
be analysed, explained or described. They can, but only in terms of other values, contrary to
Moore’s ineffability thesis.
Hare and Williams make the complementary mistake of reducing thick value terms to their
alleged “real-descriptive” content plus a universal or indeterminate commendatory force.
The No-Matter-of-Value thesis makes material axiology inconceivable.
But I hope to have shown not only that counterexamples to that thesis are conceivable, but also
that we can see and feel what we conceive in them, thus making it possible for us to describe
them more or less adequately and supply Material Axiology with its grounding evidence.

REFERENCES
Albertazzi, L. (2013). Handbook of Experimental Phenomenology, Visual Perception of Shape, Space and
Appearance, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell;
Arnheim, R. (1954, 1974). Art and Visual Perception. A Psychology of the Creative Eye. London and
Los Angeles: California University Press;
De Monticelli, R. (2018). Il dono dei vincoli – Per leggere Husserl, Milano: Garzanti Libr;
Foot, P. (1978). Virtues and Vices Berkeley: University of California Press, Ch V, Moral Beliefs;
Hare, R. (1981). Moral Thinking, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981;
Husserl , E. (1970a). Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (1890-1901). Edited by
Lothar Eley. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff;

20 Moore (1903, 1959), §15, p.21

127
Roberta De Monticelli

Husserl, E. (1970b) Logical Investigations, Engl. Transl by J.N. Findlay, Routledge, London and
New York; Vol I, Prolegomena to Pure Logics; Vol. II, Third Investigation;
Kandinsky, V. (1926). Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, Engl. Transl. (1946) Point and Line to Plane.
Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements, edited and prefaced by Hilla Rebay. New York:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation;
Kelsen, H. (1996). Théorie générale des normes. Paris : PUF, Ch. 52. « Le ‘contenu théorique’ de la
norme selon Husserl », pp. 269-272 (Trad. Fr. of Kelsen (1979), Allgemeine Theorie der Normen,
Wien : Manz Verlag);
Lipps, T. (1903-06). Ästhetik. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. Hamburg/Leipzig: Voss.
Partial tr. It. Estetica, ed. by A. Pinotti (1997). Milano: Guerini;
Moore, G.E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1959;
Murdoch, I. (1970). The Sovereignty of Good. London and New York: Routledge;
Putnam, H. (2004). Fatto/Valore. Fine di una dicotomia. Roma: Fazi, It. tr. of (2002), The Collapse of
the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays;
Scheler, M. (1973). Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Engl. Transl. by M Frings
and R.L. Funk. Chicago: North Western University Press;
von Ehrenfels, C. (1890). Über “Gestaltqualitäten”. (1890), Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche
Philosophie, 14: 224-292. Transl. “On ‘Gestalt qualities’”. In B. Smith (Ed. & Trans.), (1988),
Foundations of Gestalt Theory (pp. 82–117). Munich, Germany/Vienna, Austria: Philosophia
Verlag;
Wagemans, J. and colleagues, (2012). A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception I.
Perceptual Grouping and Figure-Ground Organization. Psychological Bulletin 138(6): 1172-1217.
doi: 10.1037/a0029333, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3482144;
Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge.

128